Lust Thrust Thursdays: SEX AS AN AESTHETIC

The chief sex-related complaint that persists through decades of dating is that sex becomes boring. It’s black and white and proper, like vintage sitcoms. It’s as exciting as putting on lipstick at a red light: two swift passes and then the sudden green light and you’re done.

And the main remedy is to “try something new.” People pick up Fifty Shades of Grey, watch the type of pornography they usually avoid, or try a position that requires more flexibility than their body is used to, and it doesn’t work. Instead of being boring, sex becomes the new gym class sport you rather watch from the stands.

A sex life can’t improve by changing every aspect of it. I believe that sex can be an art form, and in our social media obsessed world, I think sex can be improved by playing with its aesthetics. Think about it. What makes food so much more appealing on Instagram is the presentation, the lighting, the mood. Pizza is still pizza, no matter the lighting, but we’ll go through an entire food account if the photography is good. If the food is grainy and shadowy, as if taken on an Android (I feel your pain, fellow Droid users), it doesn’t do much for us. The same logic applies with sex. Taking part in boring sex is like living in a crumbling, grainy, sepia tone photograph, but if you update the image with style, the appeal improves.

style is the answer to everything —

a fresh way to approach a dull or a

dangerous thing.

– Charles Bukowski

Style is an individual’s way of doing something. It’s personal. It’s distinctive. It’s you. To have sex with style is to have the sex you want, without the worries of social norms staining your bedsheets or sofa cushions.

Style is wandering the duct tape, rope and lube sections at Home Depot while wearing a skintight leather suit.

Style is the angle in which you take naked Snapchat selfies in and sext to a lucky batch of Tinder matches you’ll never meet in real life.

Style is the vocabulary you acquire when you’re having phone sex, and how it differs from the way you talk to your boss, but not so much from your science-related PhD thesis.

Style is the slanted way a motorcycle arrives to an outdoor cafe, and the way the rider swings his leg out, adjusts his leather jacket and walks up to you and asks if you’re the person he’s supposed meet.

Style is pheromones mixed and bottled with the right cologne.

Style is the workflow of moves performed by two people who pretend they don’t know each other, but want to skip the job interview portion of the date and jump straight to bed. A brush of a hand. A hair flip. An arm around a shoulder. Wide smiles.

Style is the lethargic way cigar smoke blows out of your partner’s mouth while you give him a blowjob by a fireplace.

Style is undressing in the order of your favorite body parts. Sometimes that means you’ll show off your legs first and keep your shirt on the entire night. Or he’ll keep pants on, with an open zipper, and only show off his chest because he skipped two months of leg days.

Style is cunninglingus to the hue of blue Christmas lights hanging off the ceiling so the entire room looks like it’s underwater.

Style is sex to the rhythm of 90s R&B music. Or the intense music score to SAW III.

Style is the way you walk in the right pair of heels, and how you emulate the same hip swagger when you’re barefoot, mascara down your cheeks, and walking home on a Saturday morning.

Style is all the best parts of yourself dipped into your erotic side until everything you do, even sex, is an art.

Gem Blackthorn is QMT's Sex Columnist, and the author/curator of Lust Thrust Thursdays. Send her your submissions and questions at sexsexsex [at] queenmobs.com

What a beautiful story. Desiree has an otherworldly quality to her, a banished elf or displaced siren who developed a sharp tongue to protect her true nature in the human world. This, in combination with the very prosaic details of baby bricolage among the three of them, makes for a surreal story. It's quite wonderful. Great job.